The Joys of Home Ownership – Part II

So we were having a little trouble with the heating, that first weekend in the new house. This is nothing new to us. Looking back, we have never once shared a home with adequate heating.

Our flat on Urzędnicza, with its bizarrely-aimed toilet flush, broken shower head, and heavy 50’s-style furniture that took up loads of space but fit very little in it and left all your clothes smelling like stale perfume – photographic evidence from our six months of residence there in 2008-2009 show us wrapped from head to toe in flannel blankets, hunched over swiftly-evaporating glasses of tea.

Then came the basement on Gontyna, where it was always damp, always mouldy, and always 17 degrees, no matter how long the little electric heater went, how securely we sealed the cracks in the windows with tape, or how much we jumped up and down to get warm. (It was always 17 degrees in summer, too. Strange phenomenon of partially-underground living.)

Next it was three years on Spokojna, where we felt ourselves so expert at living in cold that we decided to save money by never turning the heat on, holing up in the bedroom (under the covers mostly, in my case) during the winter months and making rare and well-wrapped forays out to the kitchen as seldom as possible.

And finally, that wretched place on Łazy for the past four months which, being in a modern block of flats and equipped with city heating should, like all such flats, be chronically overheated. But it’s just or luck that ours was on the ground-floor and unrefurbished, and the damp and cold blew up from the floor like a persistent wind. Not to mention that only half the radiators worked, and the water heater in the kitchen was most decidedly broken.

So frigidity is nothing new for us, and we are known, among our friends, as that couple who are fun to visit as long as you bring an extra pair of socks and don’t remove your coat. But we dream, secretly, of one day living in a home where we can remove our coats and hats indoors, even in the dead of winter, and walk from room to room without manoeuvring our thickly-stockinged feet around the trailing ends of blankets.

So it was a little more than mildly disappointing when we woke up that first morning to ice on the windows and an indoor thermometer that had dropped to 10C.

But Piotrek is no one if not a Man with a Plan. And in my experience, once he has got a Plan into his head, it is best to let him see it through to the end. And that is how we ended up with six cubic metres of chopped wood blocking our driveway.

What you do, when it’s freezing cold and your gas heater is not working, is you look online until you find a moderately-priced wood supplier who will deliver for free. And as the lowest possible free delivery volume is six cubic metres, you call them right up and have all six of those cubic metres delivered the very same day. It is a good investment – it will last you into next season at least.

On his Halfway Tea Break

When the delivery truck comes, it is a bit of a let-down that it cannot, unfortunately, back down the icy, snowy, slippery slope leading toward your front gate, and you might feel a pang of woe as the decision is made by the man at the controls to upturn the truck bed and dump the entire load right between your front gate and the road. But there’s not much else he can do, and so he drives away and you are left with a heap of wood in the middle of your drive, a metre high or so, and completely blocking your car, which you had considerately moved off to the side of the house, to make way for the truck.

Never fear. Those who have visited the house may remember, among the other junk piled up in the outdoor shed, a strange contraption made of a sled mounted on skis, at which we all had a good laugh. It does not take long for a Man with a Plan to discover the true destiny of this contraption.

With a string wrapped round the end, and some boards propped up to hold it in place, the wood chunks are loaded onto the sled one by one, then pushed down the slope, steering with the string, propelled by momentum all the way to the wood shed at the back of the house, where it is unloaded, piece by piece. And there you have yourself some winter entertainment that will keep even the most industrious busy for five or more hours.

With the slight complication that, within three or four hours of the delivery, we were due to drive out of our driveway and pick up friends at the train station. But Piotrek was dogged, and kept at it all afternoon, and by the time our friends called from the station, only a scattering of logs remained in the drive.

And thank goodness for Piotrek’s Plan, because by Sunday morning the gas situation was still not looking hopeful.

The heater won’t switch on for lack of gas flow, but there is evidently quite a bit left in the tank. After more online research, another Plan was hatched – to heat the tank. Say the Internets, the gasses will not mix properly if the tank gets too cold. (It’s -11 outside – it’s probably too cold.) So a hunt was started for an appropriate container (one of the used paint buckets won the casting competition), hot water was poured in, and the gas cylinder was placed over it, fitting snugly against the rim. After a few shakes, the gas started to flow, the heater went on, the temperature rose, and eventually we could feel the effects in the radiators. With the fire going and the radiators back on, it soon reached 17 degrees in the living room. It was so warm, I even removed my hat.

We’d pushed the sofa up against the side wall, next to the fire, and set up Piotrek’s desk under the back window, so that he would be less tempted to fiddle around the house, and more tempted to study, with the warmth of the blaze on his back. We drank some tea, ate some scrambled eggs, went to bed (with the electric heater running again, just in case) and hoped for the best.

Well, we weren’t too hopeful. And it’s just as well, since by Monday morning, the gas had gone off again, and hasn’t worked since. An investigation into alternative means of heating is still underway; meanwhile, it’s picnics in the bedroom (the only warm room in the house), multiple layers of fleece, adventures in curtain-hanging, and lots of jumping up and down.

The Joys of Home Ownership - Part I

Snow has fallen in Zabierzów, ankle-deep and crisp, and that questionable miasma of overgrown lawn and mud behind our house has turned into a lovely vista stretching down to endless white fields. We stand at the back doors, our noses pressed to the glass, to enjoy it, wrapped in our winter woolies, two pairs of flannel pyjama pants, two pairs of woolen socks, three sweatshirts, hats, scarves, and occasionally coats.

We're not venturing outside - the back doors are still sealed with layers of masking tape, blocked by rolled towels, unpacked Ikea furniture, bits and pieces without shelves to put them on. We're dressed this way because we haven't yet figured out how to make the heater work properly, and it's 10 degrees inside.

This is day 2 of our official move-in, a Saturday. All Friday long, Piotrek and his parents were putting on a final coating of paint in the hall, tidying up, and trying to get the house warm after the recent cold snap. By the time I arrived on Friday evening, the gas cylinders had been replaced and running for several hours, although the radiators were lukewarm. By bedtime the upstairs temperature was still around 12C, so we decided to sleep downstairs, on our new Ikea fold-out sofa, next to the fire.

For the first time in years, I woke up to the sound of complete quiet in a pitch-black room (despite our current lack of curtains). It would have been heavenly if my nose and ears had not frozen stiff. As I pulled my winter hat more firmly over my eyebrows, I noticed there was no more crackling coming from the fireplace, and the radiators had lost their gentle whirr. I stuck my hand out to the one nearest me - ice cold. The fire was out. Our indoor thermometer showed 12C.

On a trip to the bathroom, I observed through the window into the shed that the gas heater was not running. Time to investigate, I resolved. I climbed back under the covers and poked Piotrek - "Go investigate," I told him.

And so began a very long, cold morning of “I’m going to reset it,” “I’ve done that already,” “I’ll try it again,” “That won’t do anything,” “There’s an error message on the panel,” “What does it mean?” “I have no idea”, etc, etc.

As all wise and resourceful people would do, we googled it, and discovered an instruction manual for our gas heater online. (Before finding the instruction manual, Piotrek also found a consumer review forum, in which customers emphatically confirmed that, unlike other models, this one “never breaks down.”) We discovered that error “F-1” could, in fact, be any of a list of things having to do with gas not getting from the tank to the heater.

After a lot of fiddling, it was unanimously decided by our skilled crew of one that the valve had not been connected properly, and instead of flowing into the heater, some of it had been leaking away. (I would like to add, for the peace of mind of all readers, that Piotrek, said skilled crew of one, has reassured me in countless long explanations that there is no possibility of any of us being blown up in any of the gas-tank-related fiddlings here described.) The result of the leakage was that we burned off an entire tank in one afternoon, and it was simply empty. Since the tanks cost 50PLN apiece, this was not necessarily good news, but we were overjoyed as soon as we connected the second tank – removed from its station as the cooking gas supply – and felt the radiators fire up from ice cold to burning hot. Hoorah!

I spent the rest of the afternoon removing the cardboard and plastic from the floors, washing the dishes and stacking them precariously into a sieve to dry (still no drying rack), and walking around the kitchen in circles scratching my head while I tried to decide which of the awkwardly-placed low cupboards was least inconvenient for pulling out a box of tea. With the fire going and the heat on, we got as high as 19 degrees by the evening, when some friends came over and we ordered pizza from what has quickly become our “regular”.

For good measure, we duct-taped a flannel sheet over the bedroom windows, propped pillows in the window sills, rolled sweaters at the base of the balcony door, and stood a massive great suitcase in front of it to block any draughts. We then turned the electric heater on for about half an hour and closed the door, and it quickly became toasty warm. And while it remained toasty warm in our little sealed room, during Saturday night the heat went off once again, and we woke up to a sparkly, snowy day with 10 degrees downstairs and the same error message flashing on the heater in the shed...